Holistic Wisdom Corporation

Sleeping With Everyone They Have Slept With...

The first "map" of teen sexual behavior gives new meaning to the old warning that you don't just have sex with a person, but with everyone that person ever had sex with. Researchers have found a chain of 288 one-to-one sexual relationships at a high school in the U.S. Midwest, meaning the teenager at the end of the chain may have had direct sexual contact with only one person, but indirect contact with 286 others.

The sociologists who conducted the study said they were surprised by the findings, which also showed that despite reputations and popularity, most teens in their study did not engage in promiscuous behavior with many others.

"From a student's perspective, a large chain like this would boggle the mind," said sociologist James Moody, who led the study. "They might know that their partner had a previous partner. But they don't think about the fact that this partner had a previous partner, who had a partner, and so on." This means that teens need a different approach to sexual health education and especially prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, the team at Ohio State University said.

The researchers studied a single Midwestern high school, in an unidentified mid-size town. The students had taken part in an anonymous survey that included details of their sexual behavior. They found that, just as in the US teen population as an average, just over half the students had ever had sexual intercourse.

In one instance, 288 students were linked in a one-to-one chain of sexual contact that rarely looped back. In other words, one boy had sex with one girl, who had sex with another boy, who had sex with another girl and so on. And they were doing it this way on purpose. It forces people to find new partners instead of recycling.

Social policies that could help some of them protect themselves from STDs could break a lot of these chains that can lead to the spread of disease that includes education about condom use, abstinence and other policies.